The present invention is directed to computing hardware input devices and human-computer software interfaces. In particular, the invention is directed to handheld, position-aware pointing devices with advanced scroll wheel capabilities, and the use of the disclosed pointing and scrolling abilities to manipulate a hierarchical user data visualization on multiple host electronic devices.
The recent proliferation of disparate user accounts and services, combined with the prevalence of multiple electronic devices in a user's daily activities, makes the process of repeatedly authenticating to those many devices a cumbersome and disjointed activity. Moreover, the devices, applications and online services often have distinct methods and interfaces for user authentication as well as idiosyncratic methods and interfaces for visualizing and manipulating the accessed data, interface or service.
Computer devices, whether they be desktop, mobile, handheld, or small integrated systems, often require independent mechanisms, passwords or interfaces with which to establish and verify the identity of the current user, only thereby unlocking that user's data, files, preferences and administrative capabilities for access and manipulation by the authorized user. Several software solutions are aimed at providing universal authentication mechanisms for distributing the user's identity, credentials, and preferences among hardware devices and throughout the applications, accounts, and services hosted on those devices. Conversely, there are similar software authentication mechanisms for authenticating a user's credentials throughout applications, accounts, and services which are in actuality hosted on the internet, but presented via the currently-accessed host device. However, significantly fewer hardware-mediated authentication mechanisms exist for universal access to a user's data across a plethora of devices and locales.
Furthermore, there are few prevalent metaphors for describing, depicting, and universally manipulating generalized hierarchical data and information; the most common such method being the directory and file metaphor of typical desktop computer interfacing. Textually, hierarchies are often depicted via category and subcategory nested outlines, whitespace indentations, numerical and bullet outlines, as well as syntactically- and symbolically-delineated character strings, such as parentheses, brackets, and keywords, among other techniques that are often used to represent hierarchical encapsulations in text. These hierarchy metaphors are disadvantageous when the depth and breadth of the file-and-directory or textual subcategorization hierarchies increases beyond the capacity of typical two-dimensional visual interface metaphors such as windows, long textual documents, or physical host electronic device's display dimensions. Simply put, written documents and text hierarchies often exceed the visible extents of a single page length and width, and file-and-directory hierarchies often exceed the visible extents of a display. To work around these limitations, users typically scroll and/or layer two-dimensional windows over each other, thus occluding other directories within the hierarchy.